Dear Atria,
As you know from my previous posts I visited Poland last year in December. One of the cities I visited was Krakow. Krakow is probably the most beautiful and fascinating city in Poland. The attraction is not just the splendid architecture and the treasures of art but also the unique ambience of the former Jewish district and the masterpieces of Polish Art Nouveau. However old and beautiful it is, Krakow is not limited to its monuments and museums. Krakow with its unique atmosphere, hundreds of pubs, clubs and cosy coffee bars sparkles with life  and it is really nice place to visit. When we arrived in December the Christmas Market was still just about going. There were also white horse drawn carriages starting their fares from the square and men inside great wine barrels selling spiced hot wine and lots of small stalls selling pretty little things. A blacksmith even makes swords and other items in the square and two big outdoor ‘kitchens’ barbecue sausages and other local delicacies. It was lovely to walk around and enjoy the scenery. I took the picture you can see here while walking around the market square. I hope I can take you there one day and you will be able to experience the magical atmosphere of Kakow.

Dear Atria,
While in Poland we visited Auschwitz, a German concentration camp created by Hitler during the Second World War to exterminate all Jews, some Poles, Romanians and other nationalities that he in his sic mind considered not worth living. I don’t know how much they teach you at school, but you are old enough to understand history and I try to tell you a bit more about Auschwitz. I decided not to include any pictures except one general view as I don’t want you to find it distressing. This is going to be a very sad story, but I believe an important lesson for all the future generations to learn from it and never ever allow anything like that happen again. I couldn’t comprehend how one human being could do something like this to the other human being, but apparently it has happened. 
During the Second World War Poland was under German occupation and Hitler set up extermination camps on polish territory, where he killed over 1,5 millions people. One of this camps, the biggest one, was in Auschwitz and Auschwitz-Birkenau. Auschwitz camp housed prisoners, was the location of medical experiments, and the site of Block 11 (a place of severe torture) and the Black Wall (a place of execution). At the entrance of Auschwitz there is the infamous sign that states ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ (‘work makes one free’). 
Auschwitz-Birkenau was the real killing centre of the Auschwitz death camp. It was in Birkenau where the dreaded selections were carried out on the ramp and where the gas chambers laid in waiting. Jews, Poles, Slovaks, Gypsies (Roma), homosexuals, asocials, criminals, and prisoners of war were gathered, stuffed into cattle cars on trains, and sent to Auschwitz.
When the trains stopped at Auschwitz-Birkenau the newly arrived were told to leave all their belongings on board and were then forced to disembark from the train and gather upon the railway platform, known as ‘the ramp’. Families, who had disembarked together, were quickly and brutally split up as an SS officer, usually a Nazi doctor, ordered each individual into one of two lines. Most women, children, older men, and those that looked unfit or unhealthy were sent to the left; while most young men and others that looked strong enough to do hard labor were sent to the right. Unbeknownst to the people in the two lines, the left line meant immediate death at the gas chambers and the right meant that they would become a prisoner of the camp. Most of the prisoners would later die from starvation, exposure, forced labor, and/or torture. Once the selections had been concluded, a select group of Auschwitz prisoners gathered up all the belongings that had been left on the train and sorted them into huge piles, which were then stored in warehouses. These items (including clothing, eye glasses, medicine, shoes, books, pictures, jewelry, and prayer shawls) would periodically be bundled and shipped back to Germany. 
The people who were sent to the left, which was the majority of those who arrived at Auschwitz, were never told that they had been chosen for death. The entire mass murder system depended on keeping this secret from its victims. If the victims had known they were headed to their death, they would most definitely have fought back. But they didn’t know, so the victims latched onto the hope that the Nazis wanted them to believe. 
Having been told that they were going to be sent to work, the masses of victims believed it when they were told they first needed to be disinfected and have showers. The victims were told to remove all their clothing. Completely naked, these men, women, and children were then ushered into a large room that looked like a big shower room (there were even fake shower heads on the walls). When the doors shut, a Nazi would pour Zyklon-B pellets into an opening (in the roof or through a window) which would turn into poison gas once it contacted air. The gas killed quickly, but it was not instantaneous. Victims, finally realizing that this was not a shower room, clambered over each other, trying to find a pocket of breathable air. Others would claw at the doors until their fingers bled. Once everyone in the room was dead, special prisoners assigned this horrible task would air out the room and then remove the bodies. The bodies would be searched for gold and then placed into the crematoria. 
Those that had been sent to the right during the selection process on the ramp went through a dehumanizing process that turned them into camp prisoners. All of their clothes and any remaining personal belongings were taken from them and their hair was shorn completely off. They were given striped prison outfits and a pair of shoes, all of which were usually the wrong size. They were then registered, had their arms tattooed with a number, and transferred to one of Auschwitz’s camps for forced labor. The new arrivals were then thrown into the cruel, hard, unfair, horrific world of camp life. Within their first week at Auschwitz, most new prisoners had discovered the fate of their loved ones that had been sent to the left. Some of the new prisoners never recovered from this news. In the barracks, prisoners slept cramped together with three prisoners per wooden bunk. Toilets in the barracks consisted of a bucket, which had usually overflowed by morning. In the morning, all prisoners would be assembled outside for roll call (Appell). Standing outside for hours at roll call, whether in intense heat or below freezing temperatures, was itself a torture. Food was scarce and usually consisted of a bowl of soup and some bread. The limited amount of food and extremely hard labor was intentionally meant to work and starve the prisoners to death.
Also on the ramp, Nazi doctors would search among the new arrivals for anyone they might want to experiment upon. Their favorite choices were twins and dwarves, but also anyone who in any way looked physically unique, such as having different colored eyes, would be pulled from the line for experiments. 
When the Nazis realized that the Russians were successfully pushing their way toward Germany in late 1944, they decided to start destroying evidence of their atrocities at Auschwitz. Himmler ordered the destruction of the crematoria and the human ashes were buried in huge pits and covered with grass. Many of the warehouses were emptied, with their contents shipped back to Germany. In the middle of January 1945, the Nazis removed the last 58,000 prisoners from Auschwitz and sent them on death marches. The Nazis planned on marching these exhausted prisoners all the way to camps closer or within Germany. On January 27, 1945, the Russians reached Auschwitz. When the Russians entered the camp, they found the 7,650 prisoners who had been left behind. The camp was liberated; these prisoners were now free.
Now Auschwitz is a museum and millions of people from all over the world go there to see it. I’ve never been there before and the whole experience was very depressing and really sad. We had an English guide so I could understand everything and I was very much shocked. When I came out of there I was full of hatred for the whole German nation. Of course it went away after reasoning with myself, but the whole experience was quite horrifying. But still I think worth seeing. As someone wisely ‘Let it be a warning for the present and the future, let’s learn from the past’.
I gathered the above information not only from my visit there but also from Wilkipedia and historical websites. No words can ever express and describe the horror of Auschwitz and seeing this extermination camp made me really scarred of what human beings are capable doing...

Dear Atria,
Today we went to Wielczka salt mine near Krakow in Poland. At times life offers us an opportunity of an unforgettable experience, for me this was one them.
We chose the miners' tour to get a change to closer see the mine's structure, better understand the dangers miners had to face and to experience the atmosphere of the mine and see how the miners used to cut the salt and transport it to the surface. The standard tour had a lot less to offer and we chose to take the full advantage of this opportunity. The mining tour only started about five months ago in August 2012.
 
We started by meeting our guide who explained to us in English what to expect. He helped us with the registration and getting our helmets, overalls and equipment. We were given a locker for all our belonging as for safety reasons we were not allowed to carry anything but the torch and safety equipment we were given. We had to wear the overall provided and had to keep the helmet on at all times.
Well, without any experience we were about to go over 100 meters under the ground in a seventeenth century mine, a trip which would be unwise to embark upon in any way other than doing exactly following the instructions of our experience.

To give you an idea of how we felt down there, below I've tried to put in words a selection of feelings I've experienced. Imagine the darkest night, no moon or any other source of light.

• Imagine being in a place so dark that you cannot even see your nose, or anything else for that matter
• Now add to that the total silence, you cannot even hear the sound of your own heart beating
• Your breathing is so quiet that you feel like every now and then assuring yourself that all is ok by blowing out
• Now on top of that add the thought that deep under the ground your mobile phone has no signal
• Then add to that the feeling of being on an unknown territory
• Imagine being 100 meters below the surface surrounded by a network of similar looking tunnels
• Add to that the knowing that only one of them tunnels takes you to up the surface
• And the knowing that only the guide knows where to go and which tunnel takes you back up
• Finally add the feeling of trusting your guide whom you met only for a few minutes to safely bring you back up to the surface

Of course there was emergency telephones on the walls and we each had torches, gas masks for unlikely events of gas emission, a transmitter pinpointing our exact location in case of any unforeseeable circumstances and many more to minimise probability of anything going wrong, but the possibility existed.
All in all the experience was adventurous, not scary at all.

Dear Atria,
Over the Christmas period Anna had 12 days off work as the whole company was closed for the festive season. It doesn’t happen very often, so we took advantage of this holidays and shortly after Christmas (during Christmas flight tickets were far too expensive for us) we went to Poland. We visited Wroclaw, where Anna is from, Krakow, which many people describe as the most beautiful city in Poland, and couple of smaller towns. I will try to describe some of these places for you, so you can learn a bit about them if you want.
The first interesting place I wanted to tell you about is the Christmas crib in Wroclaw in the Chapel for Deaf-mute people. I am sure you’ve heard about Christian religion and the celebration of baby Jesus being born at Christmas. He was born in a stable and Christians set-up models of the stable with the Holly Family and animals surrounding the scene. The crib in Wroclaw was created in 1967 and there were just few statues driven by one mechanism. Over the years Priest Kazimierz Blaszczyk, who was a founder of this Christmas crib have been adding various figures, which filled up the whole chapel. Now, along with decorated Christmas trees, Holly Family, angels and shepherds you can see there figures of famous Poles, characters from children fairy tales and animals from all over the world. Many families with children visit the crib in Wroclaw over the Christmas period every year. I would like to take you there at some stage - it is very colourful and shows the Jesus birth in a playful, jolly way. I took some pictures for you to see.

Dear Atria, Happy New Year 2013!
Another year passed by; look back and be proud of what you did achieve in the past year and look ahead and decide what you hope to achieve in the year ahead.
If you have not achieved all the goals you set for yourself at the beginning of last year, either the tasks you set for yourself were not achievable in the given time or there were unforeseeable events, which took precedence.

In either case, you need to try harder this year and remember that if you do your best and don’t succeed that is not a failure, merely is an indication that you need to gain more knowledge and try again harder.
Always remember that the only failure is failure to try.

We celebrated this new year with friends. We all signed a lantern and we sent it up to the sky with our wishes for the New Year.